When I finally admitted my beloved elderly laptop was a little too fragile to continue using and bought my lovely replacement computer in November, I was planning to be ruthlessly efficient and minimalist about what I put on it.

Past Me: Rather than copying 7.5 years of accumulated junk over, I’m installing the bare minimum of software and files and will install / copy as needed.

Of course that was just tempting fate and I had not factored the laptop deciding it had really had enough and refusing to start at all, even in safe mode.

This weekend saw me down and dirty in the innards of the poor old darling.

I’ve removed the hard drive, put it in an external case and am now running utilities over it which are taking an age (more than 24 hours). That’s okay, I’m happy to attack this slowly.

Worst, case I’ve lost a couple of months of not-terribly-important files.

Back up your data, folks!

While I was in the guts of the thing, I also decided it would be a good idea to sell the RAM from it and the other recently retired computers on eBay. If I get $20 for each set, I’ll be delighted. I rather wish I’d thought of this last time I carted off computers to the e-waste.

2867 days